Weekend at Cassy G’s
Our Friday was a resting day. Taking it easy, bit of housework, bit of washing, that sort of day. Pip did make some pasta with her bare hands - a ravioli cut with the pasta stamper/cutter thing she bought at Eataly in Rome and filled with the leftover knife-ninja chicken and vegetables from the night before.
We were readying ourselves for a weekend away. First to Castellana Grotte for the Fanove, and then, on the spur of the moment and to make the weekend fuller, a night at an agriturismo (called Agriturismo Lama San Giorgio) near Rutigliano. Both these places are in the north of Puglia, up around Bari height, so making it a weekend was far more sensible than trying to drive home after the festival and after the mulled wine in particular. Pip had booked a BnB in Castellana G (this is the gangster name for the town on most of the signposts) and we had arranged a check-in around 3pm. This presented us with a chance to visit some more new places along the way and we set out in the north-west direction again, this time making it to the famous town of Campi Salentina for coffee. Now, given that this town has posters of Obama every few meters along the entrance road, one could be forgiven for thinking the town had been visited by 44, but a little research reveals that these posters are to celebrate one of the town’s favourite sons, a pastry chef, who created a chocolate version of the region’s famous dessert, the pasticiotto, cunningly called the Obama a Pasticiotto. Not sure this is particularly PC, but the town put young Angelo on the plane to America to see if he could meet the man and present him with the chocolate treat. I don’t know if he ever did, but the pastry lives on in Campi Salentina folklore. We had a coffee and a traditional pasticiotto in a plain bar called Tony’s.
From Obama-rama-ding-dong, we motored on to Manduria to stretch our legs and relieve our bladders. The backstreets hid some lovely gems, including an unmarked antique shop, run by a lovely man, who quickly turned on the lights and ushered us in to his tiny shop after Pip pressed her nose up against the glass to see what was in there. He had a small, but carefully curated collection of artworks, bronzes and porcelain that were well out of our price range and carrying ability and were there for a good 20 minutes with explaining each item’s origin and history and price (just for us and just inn Italian). He was passionate and after some discussion and talk of fires at home, we managed to convince him that his lovely things were too dear for us.
We had plenty of time till check-in, so we decided to head to Martina Franca and find some lunch. We parked near one of the gates and walked into the old city, which was largely abandoned at 2pm, until we found a place on the main drag, Corso Vittorio Emmanuel. Instead of the sandwich we imagined, it was butter and sage sauced ravioli sprinkled with crushed pistachios for Pip and lasagne with tiny meatballs in it for me. There may have been some wine as well. Time to get back on the road and head on up to Castellana G. The slight hitch here was that the maze-like streets had fooled us into exiting the old town by a way other than that by which we had entered it. It only took about 20 minutes of walking to admit that we had lost the car. It was not such a great problem, given that the walls of the old city go around in a circle, so if we walked one way, keeping the walls on our left, we would eventually find the car. This was, surprisingly, the first car loss in all our visits to Italy and it took a good 40 minutes of hiking to find the dog grooming salon outside which we had parked. There was now no time to lose to reach our BnB and check-in.
There are some moments on international holidays where the stress of the unknown and the idiocy of local laws collide in a marriage-testing explosion. Trying to find a. our BnB, and b. a park in a town where half the central streets are closed for a festival and the traffic is bumper to bumper at every turn is one such time. We found a park, but quickly realised that it was in a ‘No Parking’ zone and had to abandon that idea. Three or four tense circumnavigations of the town, including one through the local burghers setting up the stalls for the festival and we finally found an empty piece of kerbside an unknown distance from the BnB. We parked and got our bags, coats and hats on and were just about to head off to find our target, when a Segnora poked her head out of the house we were parked two feet in front of and asked us to move. Fortunately, she only wanted us to move back a meter, I assume so that she couldn’t see our car out of her front door. She smiled so I moved back and the search for the BnB could commence. It wasn’t that Googley hard. It was about a half K away near where we had first parked. It was in a old building, newly renovated with a spiral staircase up to the sleeping quarters on the mezzanine. Noice, unusual, modern, but with a sticky, squeaky, scrapey bathroom door. We rested up a bit and prepared to do the festival.
Fanove we had seen before, when we were staying nearby in Triggianello, three years ago. We were taken with it as a festival and keen to come back and see it better and, as alcohol is involved, not be burdened with a drive home afterwards. Fanove celebrates the end of a plague in the Middle Ages, following which all the furniture and combustibles were taken into the streets and burned. There are dozens of bonfires around the streets (causing many of them to be closed) and some particularly large ones in front of one particular church which is in the centre of the action. The action is a festival of food stalls, around the piazzas and streets near the big bonfires. There is also a brass band which precedes the religious processions that moves through the town for hours lighting the fires. We started a little early, in a bar in a piazza with several wines and Spritz Aperols. As the festival started to heat up, we made our way down to the big fires, through some tiny streets with stalls getting underway and found our way to a shop just on the edge of the action selling buns with meat and sugo. We then needed to break a large note (they hate 50 euro notes almost everywhere) so we popped into a handy bar for a couple of G+Ts.
Amongst the food stalls, which were mostly barbecuing things or selling dried fruit and fava beans, was one of a number of stalls that was melting caciocavallo cheese hanging by a chain over their barbie onto slabs of toasted bread and serving it with a roasted sausage. Bliss! The cook let the cheese melt, then scraped it of the melty bottom of the cheese and wiped it thickly onto the bread before plonking a sausage onto it and wrapping the bread around it. An audible sigh and an eye roll followed each mouthful.
This was a big night in Castellana G - hundreds of people crowding around the fires and the food stalls, the brass band playing and marching through the crowd, the tiny streets crammed with families and running teenagers. It was the vin brûlée that did me in, and the lemon crepe - I don’t want to forget the lemon crepe. We rambled back up through the town to the Main Street, where our apartment for the night overlooked the action and it didn’t take long to fall into bed.
